Civility's Last Breath?

Rush Limbaugh likes to talk.  In fact, he does so daily on a popular broadcast radio talk show.  His topics are  current events and how the Democrat political party falls quite a bit short of the Republican political party in doing what needs to be done to govern America.   His speech is bombastic and provocative and sometimes crosses the line of what most would consider bad taste.  Last week, in commenting on a whether or not a federal health care bureaucracy should fund contraception, his speech approached the slanderous.  Everyone with a pulse and reading this already knows the story of Rush v. Sandra, so I will not go into it further.  The meat of that issue, while worthy of hours of debate is not the point of this blog.

This morning, I am typing away to offer you insight on some of the post-battle observations of newspaper editorialists.  They, as they tend to do, think events such as this are either a "great beginning" to something or a "sad end" to something else.  They, foresighted and learned though they are, seem to forget that humans have been walking upright on this planet for a good three million years.  If we manage to avoid getting hit by a wandering asteroid, I am thinking we are good for at least three million more.

Almost as long as we've been walking, we've been communicating with one another.  Most of the time, that communication is helpful to advance the individual or the society.   "Would you like a fire in the cave, tonight, honey?" is an example of a conversation that led to the health of the species. "Give me your mastodon carcass or I will beat your head in with this club," is a threat that did not.   

Well, time passed and men and women continued to develop and refine speech.   As humans migrated around the globe and things changed so too did the way they spoke to one another.   At our "great beginning" however, we were all too eager to eschew kind speech in favor of taking one another's mastodon bones.  Eloquent argument and witty retort was not the way to survive.    But we did anyway - survive I mean.   We over the millenia, have evolved away, mostly, from beating each other over the heads with sticks.  But, we still hold some of our ancestral penchant for violence inside of us.   Linguists and anthropologists tell us that, while we have evolved away from, generally, killing one another over food and other stuff, the way we talk to one another has become more coarse.   In effect, we use language as a tool of violence to show dominance over another.  It may be argued by some that that forestalls the grimmer inevitability of physical conflict.

Whatever the case, one person calling another a slanderous invective over the broadcast airwaves, uncouth or vile as it may be, is not the end of civilization as we know it.  Despite our tendency to think we are the absolute center of all that has ever been and all that will ever be, we must remember that we are not even close to being in that enviable position.   We are just a road stripe on a long highway.  We have managed to survive on this planet in spite of all the bad things nature sends against us.   We still are alive and thrive despite ourselves and, all along, have sheathed our swords preferring to talk things out.